On July 17, President Joe Biden decided to approach the press flock gathered on the Rose Garden before boarding his helicopter. When a reporter asked him what his message was to companies like Facebook on the spread of COVID-19 misinformation, he said, “They’re killing people.”
Biden doubled down his stance on misinformation two days later, not in an effort to attack Facebook, but rather to motivate the platform to crack down on the “Disinformation Dozen” — the 12 people deemed responsible for 65% of the COVID-19 misinformation spreading on major social media platforms. Yet, this is not a coronavirus-specific phenomenon, as vaccines as a whole have been consistently maligned and denigrated by misinformation as instruments of oppression by the state. Recently, this movement vilifying vaccines has shifted to the mainstream, exposing a bigger issue with social media and politics. Indeed, the case of vaccines in the U.S. may be the perfect example of what social media can do in political discourse and how it can impact society.
Before 2018, misinformation, meaning wrong information without the intent of harm, and disinformation, meaning wrong information spread with an intent of harm, were rampant in social media circles with little intervention from the platforms that hosted them. Backed by the First Amendment’s protection of free speech and Section 230’s protection of social media giants from liability for published content, social media platforms in the U.S. usually backed away from taking down posts unless they included pornography, terrorism threats, or abuse.
2018 and 2019 were a wake-up call for such platforms when the U.S. and Europe faced sudden outbreaks of measles.
Annual measles cases had risen to 991 in the U.K. and 83,540 in Europe by 2018. In the U.S., they rose to 1,282 in 2019, the largest outbreak since 1992. A 2019 article published in The Lancet identified one key factor behind the increasing number of cases: a reduction in coverage of the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccines due to lowered vaccine uptake. In response, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson laid out a comprehensive plan to tackle the resurgent measles outbreak in 2019. One of the key factors for the faltering vaccine uptake numbers, he stated, was “all that anti-vax stuff” on the internet.
The public’s confidence in vaccines has consistently declined over time, and those that oppose vaccines have gained ground thanks to the nature of social media platforms. Most of these messages seeking to undermine vaccines usually bounce around echo chambers, but once they go mainstream, they become dangerous. There often is a small minority of the population that stands in staunch opposition to vaccines as well as a majority who are willing to undertake vaccination whose confidence in immunizations is staunch and unwavering. The key portion of the population is the persuadable middle — people trying to do the right thing but who are often vulnerable to such misinformation floating around social media. Notably, it can only take a few parents flipping from pro-vaccine to anti-vaccine to push vaccination rates down to dangerous levels. Reaching herd immunity may seem easy, but breaking it down is far easier.
The same mode of analysis can be applied to political discourse, with even more interesting results.
Social media is designed to addict. Youtube’s algorithm pushes people down rabbit holes with its associative linking. It isn’t long before they end up in an epistemic bubble, and consequently, an echo chamber, where they end up actively reading and believing in alternative facts, surrounding themselves with people who agree, and preparing themselves to discredit any outside source of information. Echo chambers exploit the vulnerability of people’s inherent tendency to believe in and share fake news. As a 2018 MIT study bluntly stated, “Twitter users seem to prefer sharing falsehoods.”
The result is that conspiracy theories, misinformation, and disinformation are rampant on social media. The people impacted by political misinformation lie in the very same vulnerable middle region that the movement opposing vaccines actively targets. Usually, these are people who have not yet made up their minds about something and are, therefore, subject to having their views shaped by such posts on social media.
In public health, such misinformation can lead to the resurgence of disease, as was the case with measles. In politics, misinformation and disinformation can have all sorts of outcomes, from reduced public confidence in their government to a full-blown insurrection against the sitting government of the United States. Social media is not only laying the path for a less-informed, inefficient political discourse, but it is also sowing the seeds for populism. The power that social media grants us to sum up policy proposals into attractive one-liners extends that same power to the politicians.“Medicare for All” and “America First!” are great slogans, but while they make the rounds across the U.S., the nuances of policy are lost. With misinformation, this is replicated in how tags like “#vaccinecausesautism” get their message across but leave the reasoning behind, never letting people discover the motivations behind such ideas.
The most obvious solution to this issue is yet another one-liner — “Take them down!”
But it isn’t actually as simple as that. Drawing a line between censorship and preventing the flow of misinformation is difficult. Platforms like Twitter are adapting to distinguish between vaccine misinformation that contradicts public health information and negative vaccine sentiment that is a matter of opinion.
For instance, consider this scenario that the British Medical Journal envisions: a mother posts on her public Facebook group the words, “Prior to her 6 week vaccinations, my daughter was perfectly fine … [but afterward] she was having major seizures . . . has anyone else had this happen after their 6 week vaccinations?” There is no basis to demote this post, let alone take it down, but for every worried parent questioning if they should get their children vaccinated, the post does its job of sowing further seeds of doubt in their mind. This loud, powerful minority opposing vaccines is leading the mainstream public to be more reluctant in their acceptance of the authority of trusted institutions — a dangerous trend during a pandemic.
This pattern is further magnified in the political sphere. Most social media platforms usually struggle with finding a suitable policy and end up adopting a relaxed methodology when it comes to individuals at risk of spreading such disinformation. They did so with Donald Trump, as he continuously undermined public confidence in the 2020 election. Every component of modern media was exploited along the way, and the moment Trump was banned, conservatives cried “censorship” despite the fact that his claims were factually inaccurate.
But just like the movement against vaccines, this hard-right fringe movement that consolidated itself behind Trump has rapidly reached the mainstream of political discourse. Their impact on the modern Republican Party is clear, and with time, they have pulled in moderates into their movement (most notably Elise Stefanik) — similar to how the movement opposing vaccines has targeted the vulnerable middle.
This movement engendering vaccine hesitancy in the population tells us a lot about how social media facilitates the flow of such falsehoods. It also leads us to discover how political movements are shaped, campaigns are defined, echo chambers are formed, and discourse is morphed in the world of social media. But, regardless of how much we read or analyze, it is really difficult to grasp the pure truth, or even to know what truth is. All of this leads us to a few fundamental questions that humanity has pondered over for centuries — What is it that you can definitely call true? Who judges that? Who decides what the public must believe? And most importantly, how do we decide what to believe?
Image by Diana Polekhina is licensed under the Unsplash License.
